We feel that we are on the road to higher
mental powers; that problems which now seem to us beyond the range of
human thought will receive their solution, and open the way to still
further advance. Progress, moreover, we may hope, will be not merely
material, not merely mental, but moral also.
It is natural that we should feel a pride in the beauty of England, in the
size of our cities, the magnitude of our commerce, the wealth of our
country, the vastness of our Empire. But the true glory of a nation does
not consist in the extent of its dominion, in the fertility of the soil,
or the beauty of Nature, but rather in the moral and intellectual
pre-eminence of the people.
And yet how few of us, rich or poor, have made ourselves all we might be.
If he does his best, as Shakespeare says, "What a piece of work is man!
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form and movement, how
express and admirable!" Few indeed, as yet, can be said to reach this high
ideal.
The Hindoos have a theory that after death animals live again in a
different form; those that have done well in a higher, those that have
done ill in a lower grade.
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